July 02, 2009

painting the Violet purple

For nearly three weeks, I've been trying to paint one of our rooms, the "Violet Christine room," or simply, "the Violet."

First you have to know that we have a 100-year-old Victorian house with trim and molding everywhere--door frames, 8-inch baseboard, picture rail, the whole deal. All of that needed to be sanded, scraped, repaired, whatever. Lots of dust ensued, resulting in me going home every night to get it off my skin and out of my hair.

In addition to that, we have the original windows with ropes and weights that also needed to be sanded and restored. Did I mention that these windows are humongous? They're 48 x 60 inches. Lifting that bottom sash out by myself is something I only did once. The next time I got help. On one of the windows, we're going to have to rebuild part of the sash, since it's so warped that the glass isn't even in the frame any more.

Sand, scrape, fix, rebuild, clean up, clean up, clean up... prime... 90% of the work in painting is all prep work. I finally got to put actual paint on a paintbrush to paint the trim about three days ago, and it's taken me three whole days just to paint the trim in that room. Granted, I run a bed & breakfast, so the painting gets done at the end of the day, after everything else is done.

On Wednesday, July 1st, I was finally able to start painting the Violet purple.